In Volume Five: Chapter Twenty, we welcomed Ajanae Dawkins.

Ajanaé is a poet, conceptual artist and theologian. She works through poetry, visual art, performance, and audio to explore the politics of faith, grief, and intimate relationships between Black women. As a theologian, she blends cultural criticism, memoir, and theology as autotheory to consider the relationship between Black church history, spirituality, and creation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Frontier Poetry, The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology and more. Her solo-exhibition, No One Teaches Us How To Be Daughters, debuted at Urban Arts Space in 2024. Her chapbook, BLOOD-FLEX, won the New Delta Review’s Chapbook prize and is forthcoming in Spring 2025.

Contact Ajanae:
Instagram: @moonsatdusk
Website: ajanaedawkins.com

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

FreeQuency – The Seven Deadly American Sins
Instagram: @freequencyspeaks Website: freequencyspeaks.com

Ya Ya Poet– Ling Ling
Instagram: @yayazhangpoet

Black Chakra – Pass
Instagram: @blackchakra88

Ajanaé Dawkins – When Viola Davis Won
Ajanaé Dawkins – For The Blonde Girl and the Classroom of Ghosts

In Volume Five: Chapter Nineteen, we welcomed Educator, Poet, Writer, Spoken Word Artist, host of the Chasing After Wind podcast, and Author of the chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars To Stars, Dr. Alysia Nicole Harris.

Alysia has dedicated her life to studying words in their spiritual, social, linguistic and creative capacities. Renowned internationally as a spoken word artist, Alysia has had a professional career as a performance artist and speaker since 2010, amassing over nine million views on YouTube. The author of the prize-winning chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars (2016) received her MFA in poetry from New York University in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019.

Alysia has written, performed, and taught workshops in twelve countries for organizations including but not limited to: U.S. Mission to Ukraine, U.S. Mission to South Africa, U.S. Mission to Jordan, NAACP, Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Virginia Theological Seminary, City Seminary New York, The Disrespected Literatures Conference, Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education, University of Birmingham, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, MoMA: PS1, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Nasher Sculpture Center, The Big Quiet, Button Poetry, and many schools and universities. She is currently working with members of a Texas community to restore a 108-year-old former CME church in Texas and transform it into an intergenerational space for community storytelling. Through this work she hopes to preserve Black places and celebrate Black stories in the U.S. South.

Contact Alysia:
Instagram: @poppyinthewheat
Website: alysiaharris.com

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Ebony Stewart – How We Forget (after Loyce Gayo)
Instagram: @gullyprincess Website: ebpoetry.com

Sabrina Ali – MisterOgyny
Instagram: @sabsie_ali

Roscoe Burnems – Agnostic
Instagram: @roscoeburnems

Alysia Harris – Situations Like This
Alysia Harris – This Woman

In Volume Five: Chapter Eighteen, we welcomed Writer, Poet, Editor, and Author of the forthcoming poetry collection "Ajar", Margo LaPierre.

Margo edits fiction and creative non-fiction. She completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, and graduated from the Toronto Metropolitan Chang School’s Publishing Program. She is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. In her volunteer work, she is the newsletter editor of Arc Poetry Magazine, the interim fiction editor of Untethered magazine, and a poetry selection jury member of Bywords.ca (www.bywords.ca). In 2019, she was the sole recipient of the Claudette Upton Scholarship, an annual, national award that recognizes a promising student editor from among Editors Canada’s student affiliates. She is a member of the poetry collective VII, also comprising Manahil Bandukwala, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Conyer Clayton, nina jane drystek, Chris Johnson, and Helen Robertson.

Contact Margo:
Instagram: @margo_lapierre
Website: margolapierreeditor.com

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Andrea Gibson – For The Days I Stop Wanting A Body
Instagram: @andreagibson Website: andreagibson.com

Alyesha Wise – Flowers
Instagram: @alyeshawise Website: alyeshawise.com

Christopher Diaz – Again
Instagram: @lightbulbchris Website: christopherdiazcreates.com

Asia Samson – Enough
Instagram: @theasiaproject Website: theasiaproject.com

Ania D – Colors
Instagram: @anitadpoetry